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Metrics, and increasingly altmetrics, are a pervasive aspect of academic life. A proliferation of digital tools available have seen greater emphasis on the quantification of the ‘performance’ of individual journals. Although metrics and altmetrics are justified in terms of increased accountability and transparency, there are significant inequities in the ways they are deployed. Key among these is the unsuitability of many popular metrics for assessing publications in the humanities and social sciences, as the data, algorithms and systems which support them cater to authorship and citation practices of the various science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. These issues are amplified for journals in the sociology of sport, which publish research by humanities and social science scholars whose work is quantified according to the standards of the health science departments in which they frequently work. In this discussion, we critically examine how common forms of metrics and altmetrics, including those produced by Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Altmetric.com, are applied to available sociology of sport journals. We analyse and critique how different metric algorithms produce variable measures of performance for each of the journals in the field and reveal how other information available on these databases can augment our understanding of the sociology of sport publishing ecology. Far from advocating the value of metrics and altmetrics, our analysis is intended to arm scholars and journals with the information required to critically navigate the entanglement of metrics and altmetrics with neoliberalism, audit culture and digital technologies in universities.

Journals, and the articles they publish, make a significant contribution to the field of knowledge in the humanities. Journals in the humanities, like the sciences, are ranked through qualitative evaluations conducted by scholarly communities, national research assessments and expert panels, and they are also ranked through quantitative evaluations generated by bibliometrics (metrics) which often involves a complex mix of databases and algorithms. The use of metrics to evaluate journals, and more broadly to appraise scholars, in the humanities is contested terrain. The application of metrics as they apply to journals in sport history, sport humanities, and mainstream history mark disputed territory in these domains and require critical assessment. Using the Scopus database and three related metrics–SCImago Journal Rank, Source-Normalized Impact per Paper, and CiteScore–over a five-year period (2014–2018), Sport in History emerges as the premier sport history journal in two of these metrics. More significantly for sport history is that the field has three journals, Sport in History, The International Journal of the History of Sport, and the Journal of Sport History, that regularly rank in Quartile 1 (top twenty-five percent) journals in the discipline of history.

The Routledge Handbook of Sport History is a new and innovative survey of the discipline of sport history. Global in scope, it examines the key contemporary issues in sports historiography, sheds light on previously ignored topics, and sets an intellectual agenda for the future development of the discipline. The book explores both traditional and non-traditional methodologies in sport history, and traces the interface between sport history and other fields of research, such as literature, material culture and the digital humanities. It considers the importance of key issues such as gender, race, sexuality and politics to our understanding of sport history, and focuses on innovative ways that the scholarship around these issues is challenging accepted discourses. This is the first handbook to include a full section on Indigenous sport history, a topic that has often been ignored in sport history surveys despite its powerful upstream influence on contemporary sport. The book also reflects carefully on the central importance of sport history journals in shaping the development of the discipline. This book is an essential reference for any student, researcher or scholar with an interest in sport history or the relationship between sport and society. It will also be fascinating reading for any historians looking for fresh perspectives on contemporary historiography or social and cultural history.

This article analyses media reportage of rugby league games between inmates from the Cherbourg, Palm Island and Woorabinda Aboriginal settlements and white teams in Queensland from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. During this period, Aboriginal footballers were represented in strategic ways that reflected the key tenets of settler colonialism. At the core of this representation were dramatically contrasting yet coexisting images of "primitivism" and "transformation". Aboriginal footballers were represented in "primitivist" mode through racialised public performances and essentialist discourses of animalism, infantilism and savagery. Simultaneously, the Aboriginal capacity to "transform" was depicted through the adoption by footballers of appropriate virtues and athletic skills on the sporting field. These constructions helped entrench settler colonial dominance and practices, including the continued dispossession and removal of Aboriginal people to government settlements.

Muhammad Ali’s name is one of the most significant yet understudied aspects of the great boxer’s extraordinary life. Throughout his career, journalists used Ali’s birth name (Cassius Clay) and his Islamic name (Muhammad Ali) to transmit their attitudes toward him. This study interrogates trends in newspaper usage of Ali’s two names during the 1960s and 1970s as a way to understand changing public attitudes toward him during this period. It does so via a distant reading of 37,911 digitized newspaper articles obtained from ProQuest Historical Newspapers. By quantitatively visualizing trends and patterns in the usage of the two names, this study reveals that American journalists did not embrace Ali’s chosen name until 1971. Acceptance of the name in the press was not gradual but was instead characterized by intense shifts at key points in Ali’s career. Finally, this paper addresses the value of digital history—specifically, distant reading—for sport history scholars.

Indigenous research methodologies prioritize community voices, perspectives, and stories. In Australia, yarning has emerged as a promising Indigenous oral history research methodology. Taki...

For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions...

The policy of assimilation of Aboriginal people in Australia had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. The Australian states, which were primarily responsible for Aboriginal affairs, adopted many different forms of assimilation. In Queensland, assimilation was predominantly carried out through the extensive system of missions and settlements that the state had heavily invested in since the late colonial era. This paper examines the role of extra-curricular activities, particularly sport, that emerged out of Queensland's Aboriginal institutions in the government-driven strategies to promote assimilation. The focal point is the women's only sport of Marching Girls and the marching teams that were formed at the government settlement of Cherbourg, north-west of Brisbane. Using spatial history and document analysis, the Marching Girls are a case study to examine the complexity of assimilation as the policy was filtered through the Queensland government apparatus, to investigate the intersection between sport, gender and assimilation, and to explore how women's participation in extra-curricular activities provides insights into the assimilation project at local, state and even national levels.

Australian sports historiography, in privileging Western, reconstructionist approaches to narrating histories of Aboriginal sport, has overlooked Indigenous research methodologies that privilege Aboriginal voices. This paper adopts the Indigenous research methodology of yarning in a collaborative project with former sportswomen from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement in Queensland. Yarning, as a culturally respectful way of eliciting memories and valuing expression of Indigenous voices, was used to explore their experiences, memories and meanings of competitive marching, a popular sport for young women in mid-twentieth century Australia. The yarning sessions revealed insights into sport that are missing from the empirical, archival record, and allowed the exploration of agency and autonomy, acts of resistance, and complex intersections of nostalgia and trauma. This paper offers specific and broader insights on sport in Australian Indigenous communities and on the entanglement of the sporting past with the histories and politics of race and gender in Queensland. In repositioning researcher and researched in Aboriginal sport history, this paper demonstrates the potential of transformative narratives about the experiences of Indigenous Australians.

Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the United States Army in June 1967 led to a conviction for draft evasion, exile from boxing, and a complex response from the newspaper press. Although press reactions to Ali’s draft resistance were overwhelmingly negative, his refusal to fight in Vietnam sowed the seeds for journalists to celebrate him as a hero upon his return to the ring four years later. Press reactions to Ali’s two names (Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali) act as a lens for scrutinizing this attitudinal shift. This investigation involved macro and micro analyses of 12 United States newspapers. First, distant reading techniques were used to reveal distinct temporal patterns in the usage of both names. In September 1967, journalists from these publications began to use Ali’s two names far more interchangeably than they previously had. By March 1971, they had fully embraced Ali’s Muslim name over his birth name. Close reading then revealed how and why these patterns developed: changes to Ali’s persona, as well as broader cultural and political forces, prompted newspaper journalists to accept his chosen name and identity in early 1971.

This paper reviews the historiography of Australian indigenous sport. The historiography geographically and culturally emphasizes Aboriginal athletes over Torres Strait Islanders and temporally concentrates on the late 19th and late 20th centuries over the Protection Era that spanned much of the 20th century. In the contemplation of the historiographical silences, Whiteness and critical race theory (CRT), along with other strands of indigenous studies and decolonizing methodologies, are useful tools. Whiteness foregrounds Western epistemological perspectives and modes of knowledge presentation in professionally approved written outputs such as books, articles, and theses. CRT highlights the intricate workings of cultural forms such as sport and ways that Aboriginal people negotiate race and racism within particular cultural and social structures. These dimensions of Whiteness and CRT help demonstrate how and why Aboriginal sport history contributes to understanding race relations in Australia.

The historiography on Aboriginal sport history has grown significantly over the last four decades, but there is little scholarship on the Protection Era, and particularly on the role of sport in mi...

Reflecting on the past, present, and future of digital scholarship in sport history, this article introduces the “Doing Sport History in the Digital Present” special issue as evidence of a burgeoning engagement with the digital humanities by sport historians and sport history by digital humanists. Asking what new approaches in the digital humanities might offer for the study of sport history, we first revisit recent, and nascent, discussions of sport history in the digital era. We next discuss the ways in which the contributors to the special issue move the field forward through a connected process of doing and writing digital sport history by both utilization and critique of its sources, tools, and platforms. Finally, we conclude with a look ahead to the continued and future impact of new techniques and literacies on the field of sport history.

Advances in computer technologies have made it easier than ever before for historians to access a wealth of sources made available in the digital era. This article investigates one way that historians have engaged with the challenges and opportunities of this ‘infinite archive’: distant reading. We define distant reading as an umbrella term that embraces many practices, including data mining, aggregation, text analysis, and the visual representations of these practices. This paper investigates the utility of distant reading as a research tool via three newspaper case studies concerning Muhammad Ali, women’s surfing in Australia, and homophobic language and Australian sport. The research reveals that the usefulness, effectiveness, and success of distant reading is dependent on numerous factors. While valuable in many instances, distant reading is rarely an end in itself and can be most powerful when paired with the traditional historical skills of close reading.

It is hard to ignore the changes that have occurred to history-making in the digital age. Historians in the academy have observed, critiqued and, in some instances, engaged in the different forms of contemporary history that are related to the integration of the internet and related technologies into everyday lives. While digital history takes many forms, this paper examines Wikipedia as a mode of historical expression in the context of a project on the history of the Australian Paralympic Movement. Wikipedia’s key core content policies of verification, no original research, and neutral point of view (NPOV) as well as the collaborative premise that underpins the online encyclopaedia are the focal points of analysis. This analysis demonstrates that Wikipedia challenges historians who have traditionally produced the professionally approved artefacts of monographs and journal articles. In essence, Wikipedia requires historians to produce knowledge as part of a collaborative community of practice and,...

In this collaborative article, we seek to unsettle the dominance of Western, reconstructionist accounts of Indigenous Australian sport history through reflections on our past research in the Queensland Aboriginal community of Cherbourg. That research focussed on a statue of legendary 1930s cricketer, Eddie Gilbert, and on sport exhibitions in Cherbourg's Ration Shed Museum. Here, we are less concerned with unveiling the ‘true’ account of Australian Aboriginal sporting history, or even a ‘true’ Indigenous representation of events. Rather, we are interested in analysing various perspectives in order to generate a more inclusive and complete account of Aboriginal sport history and the narrative implications of these for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. Central to this endeavour is the positioning of Indigenous knowledge and understanding at the centre of history-making. The article is in two sections: reflections on our past work from the perspectives of the researchers themselves and an Aboriginal academic colleague, followed by a discussion of how those experiences and reflections will inform our pending project on the 1950s and 1960s Cherbourg marching girls teams.